"Cut out all the ornamentation, and you have a story about a drunk getting on the wagon and on the girl. That said, its impact is undeniable. The whole tottering edifice has many doors. They may open on to wonders or terrors; either way, it's worth taking a look." The Daily Telegraph's Philip Womack found much to commend in Lights Out in Wonderland, DBC Pierre's fourth novel, relishing in particular the "lunatic brilliance" of its set pieces. "Pierre writes to his strengths," Roger Hutchinson noted in the Scotsman, "namely, a vital narrative voice, inventive, freewheeling and scabrously funny." But he was not entirely convinced: "The first-person telling . . . whilst packing a punch, limits the novel's peripheral vision." In Scotland on SundayStuart Kelly was less impressed: "It is perhaps an inherent risk in the whole endeavour that a book which attempts to describe the 'entropic march towards insensate banality' should incarnate those qualities so perfectly."

Phil Baker in the Sunday Times lauded Ismail Kadare's "compelling performance" in The Accident, "a deliberately mystifying book" with "a continental seriousness about it, a Milan Kundera-like quality about its very un-English mixture of sex and political history". The Herald's Alan Taylor praised the "economy and pace" of Kadare's writing, while arguing that "The Accident is an erotic novel but in no way voyeuristic. This, Kadare seems to be saying, is the manner in which many people with peripatetic jobs conduct their lives. It is, in certain circumstances, what passes for normal." In the Times, Aisling Foster did not share their enthusiasm: "this tale of a dead communist society is hamstrung by the lack of story or character . . . translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (without the French-into-English filter of much of Kadare's work), the author's deadpan delivery seems exceptionally clunky."

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent was effusive about Louise Dean's The Old Romantic: it "channels the rough music of everyday life for non-Bloomsbury folk with a tragicomic subtlety, a pin-sharp ear for dialogue and a flair for every nuance of character and class. Beneath the mordant delights of observation lies a sharp awareness of the grander themes – love, selfhood, family, freedom and above all death . . . admirers of Beryl Bainbridge still grieving her loss should find solace here." The Times's Kate Saunders valued the "humane and moving" qualities of the novel: "Dean writes with beautifully controlled clarity about family ties, social class, the generation gap and the vanished England of the past." Sue Gaisford, writing in the Financial Times, also praised the "dark, scurrilous and richly comic novel" and its "sharp, perceptive writing". But the Sunday Times's Nick Rennison struck a dissenting note: "Dean has great fun dispelling any notion that class is a redundant issue in Britain. She anatomises the differences that continue to bedevil us with inventive glee, but character turns all too easily to faintly patronising caricature."